This article is a commentary, which is driven by an author’s perspective on the sport they cover as a beat reporter. In a commentary, writers are expected to take a position on an event or topic relevant to the sport they cover, and suggest a course of action.
Caleb Peterson writes commentary articles about university sport administration from his position overseeing The Ubyssey’s coverage of varsity sports on campus as Sports Editor.
Why do we watch sports?
It’s a question with many potential answers, but for me, it’s pretty clear. Stakes.
For me to invest hours upon hours of my precious time into watching people throw around a ball or slap around a puck, it has to mean something. There has to be a reward at the end. There has to be competition, rivalries, bad blood. I have to be able to celebrate when my team does well and feel heartbroken when they fail.
Stakes motivate everything in sports. Why do people care about the World Cup? Because they’ve waited for the past four years (or more) to see their country represented on this stage — and they could have as few as three matches to make it count. Every goal could be the difference between a trophy and going home. Why do people care so much about March Madness? The NBA or NHL playoffs? Because every game or series is a win-or-go-home scenario. Everything these teams have worked for, everything their fans have sat through, was to get to that point. It means everything.
It goes the other way as well. When games don’t have stakes, there’s no reason to care. For me, it is a clear factor in how I choose what sports to watch. Why do I religiously watch the NFL, but more casually follow the NHL, NBA and MLB? Because while the NFL only has 17 regular season games, the others have as few as 82, or as many as 162. In a purely mathematical sense, the NFL’s games mean more because there are fewer of them. Each game individually impacts the standings to a greater extent.
If I miss one NFL game, that could be the difference in a team’s season. If I miss one of the 162 games my MLB team plays, it likely won’t change where they finish at the end of the year.
As a whole, U Sports’ core team sports have plenty of stakes. Regular seasons are short, with each game carrying immense weight for the conference standings. Playoff spots, especially for national tournaments, are few and far between, so the competition is high. Then, when a team makes it to the national championship, each game is win-or-go-home. It makes them thrilling to follow as a fan. It’s a testament to the importance of stakes, something U Sports seems to understand.
Which makes it even more puzzling why, at the highest levels of their competition, they decide to play games with no meaning at all.
In eight of U Sports’ ten core team sports, once the league progresses to the eight-team national championship bracket, they also implement a secondary bracket — the consolation system. All four teams that lose in the quarterfinals at nationals are sorted into the consolation bracket, where they will face off against each other in three games.
The first two games are “consolation semifinals.” In these games, the two teams that lose are out of the tournament for good. The two that win progress to a final, deciding game.
For fifth place.
There’s no trophy for the winner of this game. There’s no medal. No congratulations. Nothing. Just the opportunity to walk away knowing that of the eight teams that came into the tournament, you were fifth. The best of the losers. What does this do for teams?
While the top four teams in the conference duke it out for a championship, the next four play on. They’ve been eliminated — but they continue. It’s not a bronze medal game, where you at least get the courtesy of an award. They do have one of those, but it’s not for quarterfinal losers.
It’s three games of nothing. It’s totally, utterly meaningless. The antithesis of why I watch sports at all in the first place.
I have no idea why they hold these games. It’s not like U Sports has come out and made some grand statement about their purpose. It seems to just be … what they’ve always done. For all eight of the core team sports that play fifth-place games, they have records of doing so for at least 20 years, with women’s soccer being the last straggler to add one, after changing from a round-robin system to a single-elimination tournament in 2005.
But most sports already had some form of consolation game or bracket far before then. By my count, the earliest appearance of a fifth-place game in these eight sports was in men’s soccer, who played a game for fifth between Laurentian and Winnipeg in 1973, with Laurentian coming out on top 2–0. Strangely, however, it was a bit of a one-off. They wouldn’t hold a fifth-place game the following year — only in 1976 and 1978, before doing away with it all, going to a round-robin in 1991, and joining women’s soccer in the current system in 2005.
The true pioneer, however, seems to be men’s basketball. In the 1973-74 season, their tournament looked exactly like the format we have now in most sports. Four quarterfinals, two semifinals, a bronze medal match and a gold medal match. And a consolation bracket for fifth.
They’ve had essentially the same system for the 52 seasons since, and eventually, every sport followed. The only two core team sports that don’t adhere to the structure that men’s basketball implemented in 1973-74 are football and men’s hockey — they are also the only two sports to not have a consolation bracket. With those exceptions, consolation brackets have become the norm.
Now, it’s enshrined in U Sports rules. U Sports policy 20.20.1.4 states that “where the running of the 5th place game (consolation final) can be played later than 10:00 a.m. and prior to the bronze medal or gold medal games and does not negatively affect the start time of the gold medal game, then it should be played.” It also states that the running of the game is “to be determined in consultation with the U Sports Office and the championship Host.”
But that doesn’t tell us why. Why, for 52 years, have U Sports teams played three meaningless consolation games after their elimination?
As far as I can tell, there really isn’t much of a precedent for this. Consolation games, in any sport, are rare. Most professional, international and collegiate sports don’t have them. Even historically, they were more of a temporary curiosity than anything.
Starting in 1961 and ending in 1970, the NFL played a third-place consolation game, titled the “Playoff Bowl.” It was short-lived and mostly forgotten. The players who participated don’t have fond memories of it. In a New York Times story about the event, former Lions tackle Roger Brown remarked that having played in it for "five [of] the ten years it was in existence is pitiful," even looking back at the times his team won the game with scorn, describing it as “the worst inferiority complex.”
The NCAA had consolation third-place games in their famous basketball tournament — now commonly known as “March Madness” — but they’ve been long gone, getting rid of regional third-place games in 1975, and ditching them altogether in 1981.
But those aren’t even the same as what U Sports does. Third-place games, while still rare in professional and collegiate sports, are normal, especially in international competition. Fifth-place games, however, you’ll be hard-pressed to find.
The one similar system I could find was in FIBA, basketball’s international governing body. In the FIBA World Cup — an event held every four years — they also hold a fifth-place game and even take it one step further with a seventh-place game. But in FIBA, it still kind of makes sense. Why? Because the games have stakes.
If you’re eliminated in the main tournament in the FIBA World Cup, you obviously can’t contend for a title anymore — but there’s still something to play for. Olympic qualification. If you finish in the top seven spots in a FIBA World Cup, you automatically qualify for the following year’s Olympics. So while they also have a consolation bracket, for teams on the margins of Olympic competition, the fifth, or even seventh-place games at a FIBA World Cup could be the most important games a country plays for a half-decade.
So while U Sports isn’t quite analogous in terms of structure, let’s try to apply that rationale to its consolation tournament.
Maybe it’s about qualification and seeding. It’s not a bad hypothesis. In university and collegiate sports, determining who qualifies for a national tournament — let alone in what order — is extremely difficult.
While every sport has regional divisions to some extent, they are much more pronounced in university sports. A team in the NHL’s Western Conference will likely cross over and play teams from the East about a third of the time. They’ll have to travel further, but they have the resources and time to do so. Student athletes don’t have that luxury.
In leagues like the NCAA and U Sports, the majority of a team’s season takes place within their own conference. While the NCAA often makes exceptions — like in football, where teams will regularly play non-conference games — U Sports doesn’t budge at all. Aside from preseason or exhibition contests, U Sports teams stay within the conference for the entire regular season.
Now, that’s only a problem because of competitive balance. While a league like the NHL can reasonably expect the talent across its conferences to be similar — because all NHL franchises, no matter the location, are feasibly operating under the same conditions — that isn’t true in university sport. Some conferences are just better than others at certain sports, whether that’s because one conference’s schools have more money and resources or because they just have more schools competing.
Take the Atlantic University Sport (AUS) conference in football in recent years. While the Canada West, Ontario University Athletics (OUA) and Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ) conferences are all relatively equal in the sport, the AUS simply can't compete with them. They have fewer teams than the monstrous OUA. They don’t have the massive cultural and monetary investment that the RSEQ has. They don’t have the players Canada West does. So when the conferences do meet, it’s a bloodbath.
In U Sports football, the conferences first cross over in a national semifinal game, in either the Mitchell or Uteck Bowl. Opponents rotate, so say you’re the Canada West representative; you’ll play either the OUA, RSEQ, or AUS representative once every three years.
In the past five years in these semifinals, the conference going against the AUS has won by a combined score of 241–85. A perfect 5–0. If I expand the sample to before the pandemic shutdown, the three pre-2020 years are even worse, with the non-AUS team winning by a combined score of 182–3.
Therein lies the dilemma. When these conferences finish their seasons, they have to be ranked against each other, but there’s no common point of comparison. You can’t judge how much stronger the competition is in the OUA in comparison to the RSEQ, because the two conferences haven’t directly competed against each other. Is a 5–3 OUA team better than an 8–0 AUS team? Obviously, the AUS team has more wins and hasn’t lost a game — but they’re facing much easier competition. There’s a case to be made that the 5–3 OUA team would go 8–0 against an AUS schedule.
So maybe that’s it. Maybe the consolation bracket exists as a way to sort out this mess — to give us extra inter-conference matchups to look at, to determine each conference’s relative strength to use for next year’s rankings. As it turns out, for two sports, it does.
In women’s soccer and women’s rugby, the results of the consolation bracket directly determine how teams and conferences will be ranked in the following year.
In both sports, the first four seeds are the champions of each respective conference. They then determine the order of those four champions by applying the results from the previous year’s tournament. For example, if a Canada West team had won the championship the year prior, then the Canada West champion from the current year would be the No. 1 seed. If an RSEQ team had gotten silver, they’d be the No. 2 seed. And so on.
Technically, this could be resolved without a consolation game if all four of the semifinalists were from separate conferences. Then, the medal games would provide a clean order, one through four. But this rarely happens. Say if the semifinals consist of two Canada West teams and two OUA teams. You’ll know that the first two seeds of the following year will be Canada West and OUA, no matter what happens. But how do you decide the third and fourth seeds? An additional fifth-place game. Whoever wins the fifth-place game, their conference gets the third seed next year. The loser is fourth.
On its face, this makes sense. National championship seeding is a real problem, and by using consolation games to determine which conference is better than another, there’s a tangible answer, based on what happened on the field of play.
When taken literally, however, it is nonsensical.
For one, the scope of this system is incredibly limited. Women’s soccer and rugby are the only two sports that use the results of the prior year’s tournaments in their seeding at all. The remaining eight core team sports use some other method for seeding, whether that’s coach polls, a seeding committee or ELO ratings. So, this theory doesn’t really answer our question of “what are consolation brackets for” — because most of the leagues that have them don’t use them in this way.
There’s another thing to consider too. Is this even a good idea? Sure, the consolation bracket is being used, making those matches less meaningless, but is it a fair way to determine seeding? Not really.
Using one-off games to determine an entire conference’s overall quality is bound to be heavily swung by outliers. In women’s hockey last year, despite UBC having the best regular season of any U Sports team by far, they went out in the first round in a shootout. Their Canada West running mates, Manitoba, also lost. If women’s hockey had a similar system, Canada West would be considered the third- or fourth-best conference, even if UBC were to come back and have a similarly dominant season — which doesn’t make much sense.
Also, just because a conference’s representatives play well one year, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll be quality in the following year. If a team from the often-underdog AUS goes on a Cinderella run at nationals and wins gold, should the following year’s AUS team be automatically ranked number one no matter what their regular season looks like?
In addition to not being an effective ranking system, it also still doesn’t solve the primary problem. While this system makes consolation brackets technically no longer meaningless, it doesn’t give them any stakes. Because at the end of the day, what are the two consolation final teams really playing for? They’re technically playing for seeding — which can give a game stakes, but not here. They’re only playing for the difference between the third and fourth seed — but not even for themselves. For a hypothetical representative from their conference. Why should they care?
I bet for the women’s soccer and women’s rugby players who play in this system, that consequence doesn’t even register.
So, we’re back at square one. Consolation brackets still have no discernable purpose. They’re held to determine fifth place, an achievement that can barely be registered as such, and they have no actual stakes, purpose or meaning beyond minor potential seeding implications in only two sports. Why are we here? Why do they exist?
Is it literally in the name? Consolation games. Consolation brackets. Do they just exist to “console” the teams that have been eliminated? A “thanks for coming” for the teams whose tournaments were cut short? Possibly.
National tournaments are unique in a few ways. Teams typically have to travel further than normal, as games could take place anywhere in the country. They’re also typically a last hurrah for graduating players. Maybe it would make sense to make their trips more worthwhile by letting them stay a bit longer and giving their graduates a proper send-off.
I hope that’s not the reason. Because if it is, it puts sentimentality above the good of the sport, both in terms of the well-being of the players and the support of the fans.
If it exists for the players, to console them after a loss, forcing them to go out there and play one or two more games that don’t mean anything doesn’t feel like a consolation. These players have likely just come off the most devastating loss of their careers. Everything they’ve worked for all year has just vanished in moments. Losses at a national scale take an entire off-season, if not more, to process.
By playing consolation games, U Sports rarely gives them more than 24 hours. I can’t imagine many players are emotionally ready to play again at that point.
If it’s for the fans, it dilutes the product, especially for those attending in-person. In leagues with normal playoff structures, it doesn’t matter what game you go to — you’ll get a match with stakes. All 67 March Madness games matter, because a team is eliminated in each one. All 104 World Cup games matter, whether because of a potential elimination, or because of the ability to impact the standings in the group. In a U Sports tournament, some games matter, while others don’t. It’s a confusing proposition to the fans that the governing body presumably wants to fill the stands for these games.
That’s not the only way the quality of the sport is impacted by these consolation games. Including a consolation bracket, most U Sports tournaments have 11 games — usually over the span of only three or four days. It’s a lot to pack in. In sports that have variable end times — which, in the playoffs where ties are unacceptable, is most of them — you also have to leave some wiggle room in case games go long. To fit it all in, you have to cut somewhere. And instead of cutting out the fat by eliminating consolation games, U Sports has started to whittle away at the product itself.
This is clearest in women’s hockey. Unlike most major professional and collegiate hockey leagues, U Sports doesn’t allow their women’s (and as of last year, men’s) players to decide elimination games in continuous overtime, likely because they don’t have the time for it, only playing games out of one venue. Instead, they force them into a shootout, a method designed to end games early that often doesn’t reflect how good a team actually is at hockey.
Even after that, U Sports still had to make questionable scheduling decisions to fit in the consolation games. To ensure the gold and bronze medal games had reasonable start times, UBC’s consolation final game against Waterloo took place at 8 a.m. EST, which is 5 a.m. here in Vancouver.
If you want fan engagement throughout your tournament, why would you schedule it then? Presumably, U Sports would want fans of both teams watching the game, especially since nationals are one of the only times throughout the year that U Sports games are streamed for free on CBC’s YouTube. But nobody in Vancouver is getting up at that time of day to watch the game.
It’s a strange, self-sabotaging, anti-fan decision. Or maybe they just came to the realization that — given how little the game itself meant — nobody was going to watch anyway.
But at the end of the day, consolation brackets aren’t insulting because they aren’t exciting or because they don’t have meaning. They’re insulting because it’s the players who pay the cost.
No sporting event comes without risk. To pit two teams against each other in 60 to 90 minutes of full-speed game action in any sport is to potentially assume massive consequences, especially for the players who are putting their bodies on the line.
In any game, no matter the stakes, injuries can happen. It’s the tragic, unwanted tradeoff of playing any sport. But usually, you’re working towards something. You’re putting yourself in the line of fire for a higher goal, for a cause. If you get injured in a consolation game, in a meaningless contest that you were forced to participate in — it’s no longer an honourable sacrifice. It’s organizational malfeasance.
In the women’s hockey consolation final last year, two of UBC’s players, Olivia Buckley and Madisyn Wiebe, sustained injuries within a minute of each other. They were both on the ice for extended periods of time before being helped into the locker room. The extent of their injuries wasn’t made public, and the hope is that they ended up being minor. But for these injuries to have happened at all is unacceptable.
Wiebe and Buckley didn’t need to be playing that day. Anything worth playing for was gone. Their last real game was against Montreal in the quarterfinal. They were already likely battered and bruised from a long season. They got hurt for nothing.
This could have potentially serious consequences down the line. What if a player sustains a serious enough injury that they have to miss the following season? What if that injury means a long off-season of intense, painful recovery? What if that injury lingers and continues to manifest as chronic pain?
For players who put their health on the line every time they go out on the ice, field or court, each game means everything to their well-being. The games themselves should reflect that.
They don’t need to hold these games. Even just on its face, I don’t think it’s a hard statement to get behind — if a game doesn’t mean anything, it shouldn’t happen. But it’s worse than that. It actively hurts the product — it elevates injury risk, convolutes a system that should be simple and creates a scheduling nightmare for the league.
Two of U Sports’ ten core team sports are already there. Football and men’s hockey have never held a consolation tournament, and it doesn’t seem like there are any calls for them to ever do so. The other eight sports should join them.
